Closing the Polling Gap

Posted on Jan 9, 2008

AP photo / Alex Brandon

How to explain the discrepancy—which was, in the case of New Hampshire this week, essentially on the Democratic side of the ballot—between polling numbers and election results? In a column, ABC News’ polling poobah, Gary Langer, makes some suggestions and calls for a “serious, critical look at the final pre-election polls in the Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire.”

ABC News:

A starting point for this analysis will be to look at every significant Democratic subgroup in the New Hampshire pre-election polls, and see how those polls did in estimating the size of those groups and their vote choices. The polls’ estimates of turnout overall will be relevant as well.

In the end there may be no smoking gun. Those polls may have been accurate, but done in by a superior get-out-the-vote effort, or by very late deciders whose motivations may or may not ever be known. They may have been inaccurate because of bad modeling, compromised sampling, or simply an overabundance of enthusiasm for Obama on the heels of his Iowa victory that led his would-be supporters to overstate their propensity to turn out. (A function, perhaps, of youth.)

Prof. Jon Krosnick of Stanford University has another argument: That the order of names on the New Hampshire ballot - in which, by random draw, Clinton was toward the top, Obama at the bottom - netted her about 3 percentage points more than she’d have gotten otherwise. That’s not enough to explain the gap in some of the polls, which presumably randomized candidate names, but it might hold part of the answer.

Anyone who still believes that legitimate national elections are possible in the US is delusional. It will take major changes in the way ballots are cast and counted, not to mention the way campaigns are funded, as well as media fairness and voter education before any election process can have any legitimacy.

The entire process as it is, is a disgusting sham controlled by and for the corporate elite.

Once again the pundits are going to subject their readers to an analysis of “polling failure” [gag] just like they have for the last seven [double gag] years. To dumb or to cowardly to ask just once, “Could the polls be right? Is it possible somebody’s cheating?”

But if that’s just to darn much trouble, hey, no reason to care now. After all we are all well entrenced in the republican Empire, and quite accustomed to having our rights and freedoms mashed in our face and stomped in the mud.

Besides, soon there wont be enough to go around and keep the 1% of the privileged happy, so war’s a good thing, right.

Is it just me, or does this surprise Diebold-counted victory, and the MSM’s next-day breathless exit-polling rationalization, have a familiar ring to it?
How about a serious critical look at the relationship between the Diebold scanners that tabulated the much-touted paper ballots, and the DLC governor and his board of elections (whose candidate shocked, SHOCKED everyone by winning the election in an astonishing 17%-37%-39% display of state-wide, day-long consistency)? Don’t you think it was, to say the least, odd? Clinton, 39. Obama, 37. Edwards, 17. All night? What are the chances?
Remember the good old days when we had elections, when the totals showed constant, sometimes dramatic, movement as the numbers came in from the rural areas, from the wealthy suburbs and the inner cities? Trending, sooner or later, but always in motion? And the commentators would say stuff like “looks like the rural areas are starting to come in”?
Well, hey. Maybe those New Hampshire voters just happened to maintain their relative percentages with perfect precision and consistency, all over the state. All night. I’m sorry, I can’t see it. For me, it’s a real strain to believe that all over the state as the vote tallies were reported, exactly 37% coming in were Obama, 39% for Clinton, and 17% for Edwards. All night long. Not changing. That was where they started out early in the evening, and where they ended up. Doesn’t that just sound like something a lazy programmer would do, or maybe one who only had a few minutes to get in and get out - punch in the outcome and let ‘er ride?

Here’s a link to a table that may be the best circumstantial evidence of election-tampering:

I’m amazed at the chorus of “what was wrong with the polls?” This country needs to grow up. We’re not in Kansas any more. Where’s the question “what if the polls were right?” and the logical follow-up: “Did Diebold and the DLC hack the New Hampsire primary?”

As the political and journalism establishment try to explain the disparity between the polling and voting outcomes in New Hampshire, they are missing the point. Unlike Iowa, voting in New Hampshire is private and people are free to exercise their prejudice tendency outside of the public spotlight. The only times pollsters have missed the mark in this fashion, the candidate involved were black. People are unwilling to discuss race in this situation. Racial relations have advanced as far as people are pretending. We need to look at race as a factor in Mrs. Clintons victory.

For those who would rather “cut to the chase,” the underlying principle is that, once you factor in that you are dealing with the subjective and social aspects of human nature, any “instrument of measurement” cannot avoid distorting the “signal” it is trying to measure. The consequence is that the only valid conclusion you can ever draw is that people do what people do. I do like the epithet “poobah,” though, since it reminds us of that ludicrously self-important blow-hard that W. S. Gilbert created for THE MIKADO!